The Power City: Cyborg Dystopia

From May 6 to 29, 2026, the DAMSLab spaces in Bologna host The Power City: Cyborg Dystopia, a solo exhibition by artist and director Marco Bolognesi in his hometown, curated by Prof. Giacomo Manzoli and Prof. Francesco Spampinato, as part of the cultural programme “La Soffitta 2026 - Bologna Crossroads of Cultures” by Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna.

• Opening of the exhibition on Wednesday, May 6 at 6:00 pm, in the presence of Marco Bolognesi.
• Following at 7:00 pm, in the DAMSLab auditorium, screening of the film The Truth on Sendai City, Marco Bolognesi’s first feature-length film.
• After the screening, meeting with director Marco Bolognesi together with the two curators, Giacomo Manzoli and Francesco Spampinato, in conversation with film critic Roberto Chiesi.

For the first time in his now more than twenty-year-long career, Bolognesi chooses to tell his own story, doing so on the occasion of this special event in Bologna, at the invitation of the university where he himself studied. Among the most innovative Italian experimenters in digital expressive languages, while also embracing painting, drawing and photography, Bolognesi is here the protagonist of an exhibition and multimedia project intertwining visual arts, cinema and science-fiction imagery.

Visitors will enter Bolognesi’s imaginative universe through a large interactive installation placed at the centre of the exhibition path: a futuristic city installation built from recycled materials, functioning both as an environmental sculpture and as the set of his animated films. Thanks to augmented reality, the installation comes to life, transforming into a dynamic and immersive narrative scenario. Around this central core unfolds a path featuring spaceship models inspired by science fiction, comics and video game aesthetics, a selection of drawings dedicated to cyborgs and mutants — figures suspended between the human and the artificial — and a series of short films and videos created from 1994 to the present day, documenting the artist’s creative process, where matter, imagination and animation give life to a powerful vision of the future, balancing unease and creative possibilities.

A journey through Marco Bolognesi’s dystopian production takes shape between postmodernism and cyberpunk, through dystopian scenarios reflecting on the relationship between humans and machines, the boundary between reality and simulation, and the developments of genetic manipulation. At the centre of this research emerges Sendai City, a symbolic metropolis and world-city where every photographic, pictorial or installation project created by the artist since 2002 takes shape, through which he questions the destiny of humanity amid historical memory, social transformations and loss of identity.